X is the leading website for the AI sector

When Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, had to present Meta Spark – the company’s new artificial intelligence (AI) model – last July, he did what most people in that sector do to achieve the widest possible visibility: he posted the news on X, formerly Twitter.

X has in fact become the most widely used platform amongst those working in AI: it is here that researchers and experts discuss, argue and issue warnings about the dangers associated with this technology. Jacob Coxon, a former employee of Anthropic—the company behind the Claude chatbot—who announced his resignation by stating that AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade,” did not do so while speaking to journalists or at a press conference, but on X, which has now become central to the debate within the sector, despite everything.

This fascination within the AI sector with X is as if X were still Twitter – that is, an independent social network where most journalists, bloggers and enthusiasts of politics and technology engage in daily discussions. Since October 2022, however, Twitter has been owned by Elon Musk, who subsequently renamed it X. Furthermore, since then, Musk has founded xAI, a company specialising in AI, which acquired X in March 2025, creating a single large company that brings together Musk’s other holdings, such as the aerospace firm SpaceX.

This makes Zuckerberg’s return to X all the more strange. Meta, which has invested heavily in AI over the last two years in particular, is a competitor of xAI: the former develops AI systems through its Meta AI division, whilst the latter develops the Grok chatbot. Furthermore, Meta launched Threads in 2023, a social network very similar to Twitter, which has, incidentally, benefited from Musk’s controversial management of X.

Despite everything, Zuckerberg is back on X. After all, Sam Altman, head of OpenAI – the company behind ChatGPT – is also known for being very active on the platform, even though Musk himself has sued OpenAI, originally seeking damages of $134 billion. John Ternus, Apple’s new chief executive, has also recently set up a profile on X (with a single-word tweet: ‘hello’), as has Jensen Huang, head of Nvidia. 

This week, Casey Newton—the journalist behind the Platformer newsletter and host of the Hard Fork podcast—also announced that he would reluctantly return to X. Why is that? On Threads, Bluesky feels it is failing to reach a certain segment of the audience, from which it is excluded as it is not even on Substack, another influential platform in the field of AI.

In short, it seems there’s no choice. After all, many of the sector’s most important discussions and moments in recent years have taken place on X. The term ‘vibe coding’ – which refers to the practice of using AI to generate computer code whilst minimising human intervention – originated right here, when Andrej Karpathy, an AI expert and co-founder of OpenAI, spoke about it on X. The platform hosts AI-specialised accounts that have become highly influential across the entire tech sector: one example is the business and technology podcast TBPN, which operates primarily on X and was acquired by OpenAI last April.

Earlier this month, journalist Alex Heath asked Zuckerberg himself why he had returned to the site. Zuck pointed out that he has a very broad social media presence and confirmed that Threads is doing well, but he also admitted that on X ‘there are many people from the AI sector, and with social media you have to communicate where people are’.

X’s role in the AI sector is largely down to chance, not xAI’s strategy. In fact, many of the most active figures in this sector had already been on the platform for years, as reported by Axios. If anything, it is the way the site itself operates that has changed; under Musk’s leadership, it has become a particularly fertile ground for two categories of content: right-wing political content and content relating to the technology sector, particularly cryptocurrencies and AI.

Ultimately, what matters is that the tech sector is not exactly driven by political idealism (or has ceased to be so in recent years). Consequently, many of these individuals do not give a second thought to the ethical implications of using an app owned by Musk, as many defectors from Bluesky, Threads, or Mastodon have done. In some cases, these users agree with Musk and have found a new home on X.